


Notes from the End of Everything

by Margo_Kim



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Epistolary, Gen, world-building
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-20
Updated: 2011-07-20
Packaged: 2017-10-31 10:03:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/342770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The last letter ever written from the last of the Malmooth. Spoilers for 3x11, "Utopia".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Notes from the End of Everything

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [](http://who-like-giants.livejournal.com/profile)[**who_like_giants**](http://who-like-giants.livejournal.com/) ficathon. That's another ficathon done. High fives for me as I facepalm for signing up for so many.

_Found at the bottom of storage container X-987, written on the backs of nutrition wrappers._

Chan, please, if you find this, read. Though I will die without sight of Utopia, I am the last memory keeper of the Malmooth and I know my responsibilities. Even here, at the collapse of the last planet in the last galaxy in the black sky, I cannot allow my people to lie in death unremembered. And since I am the last of the Malmooth, their tale is my own.

My name is not Chantho, but you may call me that as all humans do. As I do. My name is unknown even to myself. I should have been named by my queen in the third cycle of my life, after I had clawed myself out from the sweet jelly of my egg and grew strong on the remains. Then she would have known I would be worthy of a name. So many eggs crumple in on themselves before they reach that point. We Malmooth do not waste names on the hopeless.

We Malmooth did not, I mean to say.

If I had a name, you could not say it. You would not comprehend it. The human brain developed in ways the Malmooth hive did not, and vice versa. The seemingly endless types of personalities your species has speak to our differences. One human may be anything and all things. We are either/or. We are a queen or we are a drone, and so we know our place from fertilization to decomposition. You pity us for this, human that you are. Please don’t. Choice is not so precious to us. We pitied you, humans, in that small time when we shared this planet you call Malcassairo. You seemed so alone in your crowds.

You see, the Malmooth had no need for a writing system, and though our mouths can form words, we had no need for speech either. Those are human crutches. We did not write or speak or mime. We knew each other, in the way that one knows how to breathe and eat and lactate. Humans block their minds off from each other. They sit in separate rooms in a grand house and shout at each other through the walls. The Malmooth had no walls, no doors, no windows, no need. All thoughts were our thoughts, all memories were our memories. We were parts of one whole, and we were never alone.

But the body has a language of its own, one the mind can never replicate. So when we needed to speak with our bodies, we smelled. Our bodies had such beautiful smells. We reeked with truth. Chemicals don't lie. Sometimes, before the future kind lost their fear and sharpened their teeth, I wandered through the crumbling ruins of my conglomeration and followed the faded scent of my people. Their chemical trails lingered far longer than their source.

I survived because I was the last. The last of the queens of the hive. In my egg, they knew I held the fertility of a thousand sons and daughters. If there was hope for them, it lay in me. They hid me in the ice of the lowest level of the lowest cell, and there I waited and there I waited and there I waited. I felt my hive crumble around me, the slow erosion of time breaking down the smoothest of tunnels to rubble. I floated in the fluid of my egg, little more than an idea but a thing capable of ideas nonetheless, and listened to my people die. I felt their death because it was my death. If my mouth had been formed, I would have keened until the black heavens shook.

My nose was so young, my antennae barely wriggling, when I fell into the light, after the last humans found me in the darkness and gently cracked me open and pulled me out. I could not understand them, nor them me, but they recognized my suffering and took me in. For all that divides us, this we share: You humans and we Malmooth both understand pain. So long as pain exists, empathy exists.

And soon, neither will. But I get ahead of myself.

Perhaps I should not say "we Malmooth" because there are no others to turn "I" into "us". Sadly, the complexities of the human tongue still prove to be insufficient for proper communication. You should sense by my scent, if not my mind, that I am Chantho, the only, the alone. But you are human, or I must assume if you have found this and are reading this. Perhaps there is more life left in the universe than we can hope to dream. Perhaps you are the children of my children of my children and this collection of paper and meaningless words exists as an artifact of the darkest of times. Perhaps. But the sky is still black and I have never known it to be otherwise. There is so little hope left that to waste it on too many outlets is to spread it too thin. The humans hope only for Utopia, and Professor Yana hopes only for them. I hope only for him, and there is no one left to hope for me.

I am alone at the end of the universe. I keep the collective memory of my people, and when I am dead, it is gone. Even now, the memories grow dimmer and dimmer. They were meant to be held by a species not one lonely queen, and they are spilling out of me and floating up into the sky. I have so many fears that I can scarcely remember them all, but this is I fear most of all: To die alone as empty as the husk of my planet.  
This is why you are on the ship and I am not. I have no hive. My hive is dead. But so long as the Professor breathes and I am by his side, I am not alone. He does not understand me anymore than he could speak my true name, but he gave me the only name I’ve ever known. I forgive him everything for that. If he does not feel for me as I feel for him, sometimes I am fine with that. There is no rule that love must be requited.

I will die on what’s left of my planet, seeker of Utopia. I will die on a skeleton of a world I never knew. I will die with a man who does not love me, with memories I cannot recall, with an emptiness in my head where my people will be. And yet I will die happy, traveler. Happy to have lived and that once my people lived. Happy, even as the rest of my mind fades, to remember the stars and the silent songs of my people and the other indelible wonders I cannot forget without forgetting myself. Happy to have loved at all. Human, the universe is beautiful, regardless of how much is left of it. Remember that. As you fly to the stars, remember that. There is no one else left who can.

That is it. There is no more. I am Chantho, the only, the last, and I am done, tho.


End file.
